I got into the office actually kind of early this morning and was reading my inbox and then I read this:
What we’re doing isn’t entirely new. But it is new enough that there’s no sure blueprint for success. We’re taking some old ideas from the pre-digital era – namely that cultivating a small, passionate audience can be a more durable and sustainable foundation than chasing a large, indifferent, and transient one – and grafting those onto modern media realities.
Escape Collective Newsletter
It’s sort of a passing point, but one of the reasons I really love the Escape Collective is that not only do they do bikes good, their takes on media in general are, I think, super enlightening. And funny (if I could remember which episode of the Placeholders Podcast it was where they were talking about AI-generated content I would like to it, but I cannot and I have a meeting soon). But I don’t really mean to fawn (though I do, genuinely, love what they do over there).
What I liked about Joe’s aside in this newsletter is the idea of cultivating a small, passionate audience. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately; in fact I was talking about it just last night with a buddy of mine (Nick Snow) when we were scoping out a location for the next "Boston Writers Meetup" thing I’m trying to put together. Like the novel manuscript, I really do need a better name for the thing. But.
Part of me always wants to be running a literary journal. This has always been true. I started my first "journal" in the fifth grade for fuck’s sake. I’m not even sure I had even seen a "real" one at that point, but I’d read The Landry News and The School Story (both by Andrew Clements, both excellent) and thought that something like that was what I wanted to do. (What might have happened if, instead, I had been reading books about famous mathematicians or engineers…) And I’ve worked on a number of literary journals. I’ve been a reader, "web guy," editor, editor-in-chief. I was all of the jobs (save copyeditor, because I can’t do that very well if I’ve already looked at a piece 100 times) when I was running Response. And I really loved Response.[1]
But one of the (many) problems with Response was the non-local nature of it: all I wanted to do was host a launch party, and 90% of my contributors were out of state.[2] I think it was genuinely really cool to have conversations with folks in Oregon, Iowa, Arizona, Texas, etc., but although I like to think that, for the purposes of an editor-writer relationship, we got on fine, these were not, by and large, folks I was ever really going to talk to again save on social media, much less ever meet.[3] I’ve always dreamt (like many, I am sure) of being a part of a community like Concord, MA in the 1850s,[4] or Bloomsbury, or Paris in the 20s, or whatever. But the thing about all those things is that they happened in a place at at time, not in the asynchronous nowhere of the internet.[5]
So when I read about Escape Collective cultivating "a small, passionate" readership, I am heartened, not only because I consider myself a member of this readership,[6] but because they’re following (spiritually) a model that I have very much of late been finding to be the only reasonable way forward for community.
One thought: back in the pre-social days of the internet there really were, I have been given to understand, proper online communities. But these were forums, places you visited, as opposed to algorithmic, feed-driven ubiquities. You can have community if everyone sees more or less the same content, has more or less the same ability to make noise.[7] But if everyone sees something slightly different save for the posts that "blow up" (what a metaphor!), if not everyone’s comments are sequential in time but rather reordered based on opaque algorithms, if the point of the content you provide to the platform is ultimately a carrot with which to get you in so you can be then hit by the stick of the advertisements that pay for the platform, well.
These are not new arguments; other people have made them and have almost certainly made them better than I have here in short-hand. Still. When I think about creating a writing community, I’m thinking about how I can do it locally and make it always an in-person kind of thing. When I’m thinking about relaunching the journal, it will be a fucking local thing. Sure, anyone can read it, but if I want to highlight the community of writers in which I work do I really want work from outside I-95? I-495?[8] Even if it’s fucking amazing?
I’ve been thinking probably too much about all of this lately. Part of it is that I am beginning to slowly build up some kind of local writer thing. Part of it is because I’ve got a manuscript that’s about ready to start shopping around and I feel terrified at the prospect, feel without anchor or safe port. Part of it is that I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet and web technologies and tools more generally and how they shape our thinking about and interactions with the world.
But it’s what I’ve had to think about, so —